Wednesday, February 25, 2009

Sexy Jobs

Since many of you will be thinking about jobs soon, here is an interesting posting about desirable jobs. Many of you are in the right area!

In a recent talk by Google's chief economist Hal Varian, he says this:

"I keep saying the sexy job in the next ten years will be statisticians.People think I’m joking, but who would’ve guessed that computer engineerswould’ve been the sexy job of the 1990s? . . . The ability to take data—to be able to understand it, to process it,to extract value from it, to visualize it, to communicate it—that’s going tobe a hugely important skill in the next decades, not only at theprofessional level but even at the educational level for elementary schoolkids, for high school kids, for college kids. Because now we really do haveessentially free and ubiquitous data. So the complimentary scarce factor isthe ability to understand that data and extract value from it. I think statisticians are part of it, but it’s just a part. You alsowant to be able to visualize the data, communicate the data, and utilize iteffectively. But I do think those skills—of being able to access,understand, and communicate the insights you get from data analysis—aregoing to be extremely important. Managers need to be able to access andunderstand the data themselves. "